


2020: Leaps & Bounds

by Whimzlogo



Category: All Elite Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Ambiguity, Banter, Canon-Typical Violence, Companionable Snark, Compatibility, Gen, Kayfabe Compliant, Metaphors, Past Relationship(s), Relationship Study, Roughhousing, Some Plot, Time Skips, Unspecified Setting, Vagueness, Wrestling, but it's not said at any point where they actually are, comfortable silence, like descriptively it's explained, wrestling soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25979149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whimzlogo/pseuds/Whimzlogo
Summary: Jon Moxley knows Seth Rollins is a bit of a crook. He's kind of one as well, so he can spot another from a mile away.That, maybe not so much to his surprise,isn'tthe reason why keeping in touch with the guy, meeting him behind buildings or in bars to throw down or flocking to quiet spaces in the great outdoors like the two birds of a feather they always were to rub elbows in an inherently fighty way, makes Jon's wrestling soul so happy.
Relationships: Dean Ambrose | Jon Moxley & Seth Rollins | Tyler Black
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	2020: Leaps & Bounds

Jon Moxley _knew_ Seth Rollins. Of course. He wasn't lost on who he was or what he meant to people. That was very base level. A very easy thing to grasp and remember. While he might have only seen the dark-haired man through a red-orange incandescent lens for the past six or so years with limited to noengagement, that was, doubly, all the more reason why he knew Seth as well as he did. He didn't need to engage, so he observed, and he observed well. In hindsight, Jon was a little lost on _why_.

He observed future opponents for reasons concerning tactics, but with the way things wound up going, there was never much of a chance Seth would ever _be that_ to him. To _Dean_ , yes. To the man who knew Seth about as well as he did but in a _vastly_ different way, yes.

Dean vied for a relationship with Seth that was one half obsessive instigation and nigh-endless _war_ , and, on the other end of the spectrum, another half that was... well...

Dean hadn't known until closer to the end that Seth thought the two of them to be two sides of the same coin. "Wrestling soulmate" was the term Seth had used, trying to get Dean to stop being such an immense prick and join up with The Shield again, which was... yeah, kinda contradictory, in a way, because "wrestling soulmate" seemed to translate more to, "someone I enjoy wrestling"... but in reality it _wasn't_ contradictory because it could just as easily mean, "someone I want to wrestle others alongside, because you're my brother and my best friend and I love you and I don't want to spend _all_ my time making you hurt because life is short, did I mention I love you?"

The latter option was more applicable at the time, for sure, even if it was a bit honeyed for Moxley's taste, and even if Seth wholeheartedly meant it _both ways_ , actually—but it certainly wasn't like he and Dean were ever going to lock horns again unless it was on their own time and for fun.

That was where Jon entered.

Jon had poise (or, in complete turnabout, he didn't have any at all, but that was intentional). He squared his shoulders more than, stood _taller_ than Dean did. He re-pierced his ear. He was an essential wildcard to even those who had familiarized themselves with his face, Seth more included than most.

The only thing he came to find _didn't_ play in his favor was that his _thoughts_ , no matter how fleeting, were practically up for nosy grabs if he didn't expend the effort to guard them, with his face and his body and even half of that shared soul he had inside him.

Watching from a distance suddenly didn't cut it anymore. It gave him very little to work with, in the long run. Seth Rollins actually _was_ a stranger to him. Not as bad as that person who insists on sitting in the seat right next to yours in the waiting room, but close. And it only got worse as time went on—for a multitude of reasons.

One of them was that the loose translation, "someone I enjoy wrestling" barely scratched the _surface_ of what it meant to be someone's wrestling soulmate. That it _was_ sort of a preference thing, but it was also a gambit for wholeness. It sounded like something Moxley would hate— **not** because he was conditioned to, because he was conditioned to do nothing except what _he_ wanted and that was that—and yet he didn't. He didn't hate it. He didn't hate Seth, either.

He wasn't sure if it was a longing. It wasn't an addiction. (Addictions weren't nearly as healthy as this.) He didn't suffer withdrawals. Maybe he would have, had Dean not parted with Seth on such good terms. There was no degree of desperation to it; there were no questions about it: he would always see Seth again.

Jon was a generally showy person, but he wasn't a boaster, and yet whenever he had a kneecap pressed up into Rollins' upper back or a few fingers hooked under his chin, every bone creaking precariously and every muscle shuddering, practically audibly... there was never anything quite as gratifying as the given action being "the thing" that stripped Seth of his know-it-all-ness. Of his will to endure. (Lord, was Seth a know-it-all. A shameless one. And an endurant son of a bitch.) It was like stamping out a flame. A loud, cocky flame that kept on cropping back up, like a _weed_.

The end goal was never to take Seth down a peg or make him doubt himself.

Well, not for the long term, anyway.

Jon couldn't refuse the call. Ever. It was the kind of thing that convinced him to take off his gloves in the dead of winter, or leave the house entirely without them. He'd wear a jacket, sunglasses sometimes, and it was never intended to be consciously premeditated, but more often than not both articles were left on a nearby picnic table bench or a seat in a gym and he was on the hard dirt ground or the scratchy wood panel floor _spitting_ , like he had venom coursing through him, clapping his biceps over the younger man's head and neck, leaving a crick somewhere hard to reach, imprinting reddened crescent marks courtesy of his nails on Seth's skin until Seth pried him off, and, slowly but surely, steered him back.

They indulged in that a lot, the unacquainted two of them. Well into the new year. They were no strangers to how the other _felt_ , tangibly.

Then, in an unexpected way, that changed as well. Not for Seth, because Jon never stopped tangibly feeling like Dean. Or, if he did, Seth never complained about it, so Jon just assumed-

No, no no. Guh. Wasn't about him. The point being made here was that leather jackets were never really _Seth's_ _thing_. He left the perilous task of wearing those up to his cooler brother. (*Brothers. Roman was good for it, too, from time to time.)

Yet, for some nondescript reason, that was what Seth was wearing one day as he hopped out of a black SUV someone _else_ was in the driver's seat of, long, dark hair tied back, which was nothing unusual on its own. He was shirtless otherwise; the shiny, fur-trimmed jacket covering his arms and his shoulders and his back as he strode up under the same noisy overpass Moxley was chilling beneath bare-chested, right hand gloved and the other not, anatomizing stare falling across the World Champion and _locking on_ like aligning crosshairs. 

"You know I won't fault you for not being impervious to the cold, right?" the one with the cropped hair asked, as soon as the other man drew near enough to hear him.

Maybe it was that whole _done_ aura around Rollins; the day-old-looking shiner that made his right eye look smaller because the skin was all puffed up around it, or the uncharacteristic moment's hesitation before he sat down at the bench table, beside and a few inches away from Jon... Jon wanted an explanation for those things, maybe, and _that_ was why he didn't go on the attack right away. He had no reason to _care_ , really.

"Hey." He tipped his right leg, butting it into Seth's left knee. There was no resistance; no push back. The only seeming strength in Seth's body was the terse glare that caused his head to turn, ensuring it was directed at Jon and not the patchy yellow grass and dirt mounds (littered with broken glass shards, he just then noticed) in front of their feet. "You don't wanna talk."

It wasn't said like a question. It _wasn't_ one.

Jon felt silly after that. _He_ wasn't the talker. Seth was. But not today he wasn't.

The roar of cars moving overhead on the overpass was the only flavor of ambiance they were getting today. (Why was there a picnic bench under there anyway? Who would want to eat lunch under all that noise?)

* * *

Seth Rollins got popped in the jaw. _Hard_. And maybe it was his own fault.

"Continue being quiet if you want me to take the first shot," Jon said to him.

Seth fell down to a knee after getting spiked. The blue-eyed man's knuckles were more callused now than they were a year before. Of course, they never _ceased_ to hurt, at _any_ point... but right then, at that moment, they rocked Seth and took his thoughts away, and it was painful, but nothing was fractured. Probably not.

The quip, the little jab at his selective muteness for the day— _that_ he didn't care much for.

It pissed him off. He wanted retribution in some form or another.

It showed on his face as Moxley picked him up off the padded knee with an arm coiled tight around the back of his head and neck and another under his elbow, guiding him to his feet, genially patting him on the temple as he lifted him.

He didn't like toying with people as often as he used to, Rollins noted, but that didn't mean there wasn't the occasional exception. During this time, this day, this _month_ , he wasn't a fan, and he was efficaciously convinced he got that point across by ducking his head and driving the dome of it straight up into Moxley's sternum, hard and fast enough to break his hold and stagger him.

Seth rushed him in the intervening time Mox spent getting his breath back, shimmying out of his jacket on the way there and dropping it unceremoniously on the ground behind him so there weren't as many handholds on his person to take advantage of. All personal, grappling contact.

It was what _Moxley_ would have to do to best him, amid trying to get his _own_ jacket off for similar reasons—but now he was having a difficult time doing that, because Rollins already had him by the sleeve of it, whipping him into the black steel table they were in close quarters with tailbone-first, nearly tipping it over if not for the equally-as-weighty slamming of Jon's one hand on the nearly-uprooted side of it.

He used the grip Seth still had buried in the fabric to wrench himself out of the extra layer, but he only achieved separation from him for a meager second and a half before he was pulled back in. Back _down_.

Seth's broad arms were thrown over the burly dude's shoulders from behind now, and the palms of his hands were paddling on his skull-adorned t-shirt-covered chest as he thought long and deep about the flaring pain in his jaw. He sidestepped and shoved Mox against the table, pushing his upper half down until his back bowed and the table legs _screeched_ and Seth could rain down right hands freely on his semi-supine form, holding one of his arms down and away by the wrist. Fists to his aforementioned chest, and, just as well, on the faces of both his shoulders.

Jon uncurled and straightened out when it seemed to him like the worst of it was over, making a sluggish grab for the hand Seth'd been using to impede interference in the assault. Seth didn't let him catch it, pulling it back until his elbow was a point; nailing Jon one final time in the gut.

He thought for just a minuscule, microscopic moment that the shorter-haired man was going to keel over. Knees buckling, a forearm thrown over his midsection as he winced. Destination for crumpling, seemingly, the brown concrete of the abandoned patio they stood between the surrounding gates of.

(The restaurant _itself_ wasn't abandoned; they just went in together and got in-store pickup, actually. (Jon did all the talking.) It was just too chilly to use the patio. And they wouldn't. Jon already invited him to come eat inside his nice new car.

Seth fully intended on taking him up on that offer, but the appetite for it needed to be worked up first. Not a problem with them.)

He, perhaps, spent just a _little_ too much time reveling in being above Moxley, calling the shots. Only a little. He found that out when, instead of keeling, the champion shoved him back by the chest—with enough force to send him backstepping over two squares of pavement.

Mox followed after him at a leisurely pace, but with Seth making an immediate (foolish, he would later admit) point of charging him, it wasn't a slow spectacle by any means. The younger dealt a super kick, but the elevated limb was grabbed under the knee and held in the crook of the older's arm. Seth's unsure hobbling transitioned into a jump and an enzuguri upside Mox's temple, getting him to let go of the leg. It turned Seth away in his own right, falling, dropping to the toes of his boots and the tips of his fingers as he regained his balance with both reclaimed legs.

He got up to a vertical base again... and spun around to be met by an immediate clothesline, vicious in nature, too quick to avoid but not quick enough to _not_ comprehend exactly what it'd been. Rollins went down like a lone domino—although that was all entirely within Moxley's control, capable as he was of not only taking someone off their feet with it but also flipping them completely over before they hit the canvas.

Seth's palms and wrists absorbed a lot of the impact of the landing, which made it easy for Jon to swoop in on him and land some hits of his own to Seth uninhibited, with his whaling fists and his stomping feet. The only thing he did throughout the entire ordeal that actually ripped a sound of pained exertion, of discomfort from Seth, was when he dropped down to the close right of him, braced his hands on the left, and rammed his knee forward, striking with enough force to roll the other man over had he not been holding him stationary.

He lunged back up quick as anything after that, returning to the far end of Seth to pick at his legs. Warnings buzzed through Seth's body up to his brain, and he kicked hard, easily freeing the malevolent grasp on his ankle, the _other_ malevolent grasp on the back of his heel. He dueled another from the side; anywhere near the appendages was an essential danger zone. The strength of it pushed Jon up against a set of chairs, swearing as a bruise was branded on his back somewhere. He bent over, hand favoring the afflicted spot, legs trembling.

Seth used the short break for all it was worth, picking himself back up. His hair tie fell out at some point. He only noticed when he leaned over Jon and grabbed _his_ hair (that was beginning to grow out again, by the looks of it, if Seth could get that good of a grasp on it); the dark brown strands spilled over his shoulders and into his eyes, and over Jon's shoulders and forehead.

He was coming undone here. In a _few_ different respects. But it never mattered when he was here, and maybe that was his reason for showing up now. He wouldn't ever demand unity from this man. Unity wasn't important here.

Jon chastised him for faltering (apparently, he did), and then he toppled him, right up against the same chair.

He wrangled Rollins onto his stomach with the doubtless intention of pretzelizing one or both of his legs; Seth's two best assets. And Jon would do it with absolutely no exceptions this time.

Bare skin getting all abraded on the cold, rough pavement, and the strategist (or so he used to be famed for being) realized in the middle of his wise, self-imposed silence that he was all _kinds_ of grateful they were no longer at that place under the overpass with the broken glass on the ground.

He had a pretty good feeling Jon wouldn't have let up a single bit if they were.

* * *

It was sometime down the line—everything anticipated and expected—when Jon met Seth again. The weather was getting fairer. Hot, even, if you found the right patch of sun to stand in. No jackets needed.

Seth strolled up, walking through a light beam... looking _divinely powerfu_ _l_ doing so, hilariously. He was glancing around with wariness, like he still didn't know where Jon was, even though he was standing right in front of him.

His gaze panned over the unkempt field, arms crossing over his now shirt-clad chest, taking everything in. His stare breezed over Jon, unhurried, as if he was just some kind of an afterthought to him. Nothing significant.

The silence stretched on between them with birdsong filling in the lull.

It wasn't uncomfortable. Nor was the way they drifted physically closer to one another, until they could discern smaller details like the shading on a scar, or gilding on arm hair, or muscle movement around the nose and mouth. 

Then, something different happened. Something straight out of the recently established norm.

Seth smiled at him. Quite like how he used to, unwary tenderness in his softening eyes and all, making the brown in them stand out a little warmer.

It was weird. Probably just some kind of ploy. Seth was calculating to a scary degree, but even _his_ calculations were wrong sometimes. The wrong ones were nearly always comprised of assumptions that were faulty. It harkened back to that point Jon had about Seth being a know-it-all, so _sure_ of where he was stomping down... until the sole of his boot hit the canvas instead of a cranium, and his quarry gave him the slip.

It took more than a disarming smile after a handful of meet-ups composed of reticent silences and scowls to throw Jon Moxley off his game.

They were on this winding path that rose and fell and curved. The tall, dry grass cropping up all over the place made it hard to see around the next bend. Serene, though. Jon only had half a mind for his just-arrived companion, movements languid as he walked over the next little hill and then down the other side. He heard steps a few feet behind him.

"So, basically," Seth said,

and Jon blinked, neck craning and head turning to look back at him, genuinely surprised,

"you've got to hang onto that title belt of yours until late February, 2024, at least."

The initial shock of hearing him say _anything_ quickly caved to confusion at the notion he brought up.

"Wait ... Why?" Jon asked. He stopped walking, concentration stilling his eyes as he watched Seth take his sweet ass time catching up to him and then slowing to a halt right beside him.

Seth was facing onward, toward the next horizon, and motioning to it like he was giving a speech in front of the masses, rather than talking one-on-one with a person to the left of him: "It won't really mean anything when it's finally the one year anniversary of you winning it; I mean... not if you don't have it anymore."

"Seth..." Jon struggled to find the right tone. To convey his puzzlement _and_ his unwillingness, his obstinacy with refusing to put up with wispy, clever bullshit today. Or any day. "How in God's name does that mean I'd have to be on the same title run I'm on right now _four years_ from now?"

"February 29th, 2024, the one year anniversary of Jon Moxley winning the AEW World Championship," Seth caringly said, gentle and meticulous, like he _wasn't_ being the biggest little shit on the planet and everything was obvious and _Jon_ , definitely, was the one just not _getting things_ today. And that may have been true.

For a few very real moments, though, Moxley was legitimately considering just... full-on walking _out_ on his different-time, different-place, different- _face_ brother. Denounce his joke, flip him off and tell him to come back when he actually had something funny to say.

He grew to be secretly glad he didn't do those things as Rollins went on: "Next Leap Day we've got. When that day comes, I'm gonna _drown_ _you_ in annoying witticisms and dumb jokes until your eyes roll back into your head. _Imagine_ all the ammunition I'll have by that time; all the battles you'll've fought. Not to mention you'll probably know better by then not to step to me so much."

"You're already getting a head start makin' my eyes roll back into my head," Moxley observed, carefully withholding his amusement.

"This is the last time," vowed Seth. "I won't do it again until that day ... Also, probably, I'll throw you and the belt a party."

"I can _assure you_ this conversation we're having now won't even be on my mind then."

"Then it'll be a surprise party."

"Don't you even dare. I'll drive you down head-first into a bed of cactus. You'll be picking areole spines out of your mush, brotha."

With that banter out of the way—flashes of the past remaining mere flashes and never phasing fully into focus—they carried on with their walk.

Somewhere down the soft, crunchy path, Seth thought hooking his leg around one of Jon's and tripping him up was a good idea. Jon doubled over, misstepping for all of three seconds, and then he retaliated. Seth could be heard inhaling sharply as he was snagged under an arm and hoisted.

Jon grunted his discomposure. Rollins planted his feet and held firm; pried back the fingers on the hand clamped down on the shoulder seam of his shirt, one by one. Then an actual _shout_ and sequential grunt of Moxley's body colliding with the ground spilled from his lips as the longer-haired man wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled him down into the tall grass.

Jon's shoes made scraping wells in the dirt as he resisted and bucked and Seth latched himself onto his back as he rode him to the ground, chasing and encompassing. Wrestling each other around, body heat and puffs of labored breath, until one was flat on his back and the other was responsible for it.

Jon was warm, inside and out, even without the sun beating down.

Except, rather than hold his shoulders to the ground for any length of time, Seth, the eventual victor, rose off Jon, feet straddling him and then not as he backed off. He offered his gloveless hand down.

It would have been fine, but then the rough palm made connection with Jon's temple, _patting it_ ,like the arrogant doler of said patronizing patting thought he was worth a shit. Like his encouragement was meant to be _golden_ to a guy like Moxley.

The severity of the champ's warding scowl was what caused Rollins to give up on his straight face. He trembled and _trilled_ with laughter all of a sudden, as if he'd been holding in copious amounts of it for a long while. Jon couldn't bring himself to doubt it. Not now.

Seth was all but bowled over backwards by the force of his mirth as he backed up out of the flattened grass, continuing to cackle—Jon would argue _evilly_ , but that wasn't what mattered; the fact that Seth was baring a grin at him at all indicated that the patting stunt was only a one-off thing. A razz.

Wouldn't happen again.

Jon brushed aside the long grass stalks as he returned to the path, frowning deeply, until Seth's obnoxious quacking petered out and he could think clearly again, without interruptions caused by uninvited feelings from the past—or, in this case, _noises_ from the past.

A certain commitment to brawling Seth Rollins to the ends of the Earth for the next four years didn't sound so terrible, though.

It would probably take that long and _then some_ to ever find the source of that undying flame and snuff it out once and for all.

That was because, as it turned out, Jon Moxley didn't actually want to do that. He would keep putting doing that off, in fact. Keep kicking dirt over the fire, but never too much. Always just enough to ensure a rebound.

**Author's Note:**

> For your guys' knowledge, Seth teasing Mox about having to successfully defend until the next Leap Year four years from now to be able to say he's held the championship for only one was the entire foundation that this story was built upon. Everything else was just a contextual add-on. Like, I'm seriously not kidding; that dialogue between the two of them was the first part of this that I wrote down.
> 
> Then Seth did his [iconic evil laugh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRduAt6sPIw) on Raw, and I knew _exactly_ the note I wanted this fic to end on.


End file.
